Slooooow down with a cup of tea; there's no need to rush.
Our conversation is three hours. We walk you through the experience day by day – starting a few days prior to death and ending with the cremation. One of the themes of our conversation was spaciousness and slowing down – how important this was around the moment of Phil's death, and throughout the 42 hours that we kept his body at home afterward. And so, sitting down together six months after the death to reflect on the experience, now 7,000 miles physically apart, Dylan and I approached Phil’s home-funeral story with this same spaciousness. Sharing as many details as we possibly could: emotional, logistical, and the meaning we’ve made from it all. If you know Dylan, you probably know him as an eloquent, wise-beyond-his-years mystic-yogi with a calming presence. What I learned about him in the week of his dad’s death is that Dylan is also a former musical-theater kid (you should hear the Mariah-esque high notes he can hit), with a wildly spontaneous and alive creative streak. Over these three hours, you get to hear Dylan make sense of loss in his quintessentially discerning, wise, open-hearted, and poetic way — but also by embracing performance, fullness of expression (including taboos), and taking center stage in the death and grief process.
Because this was a long conversation, I’ve made a few ways for you to engage with it in smaller doses. There are six short clips from the conversation, linked below and in the YouTube video description. I’ve also detailed what we discussed in each chapter, in case one of them specifically calls to you:
Intro and Phil’s diagnosis (00:00). Dylan's caregiving years. Having a very abnormal young-adulthood.
THURSDAY: Improv & the imaginal. Dylan gets a break from caregiving so we go on a hike. Loosening how we normally act and identify in the world, through improv and the imaginal; allowing surface-level personas to crumble, so other energies can seep through. The softness that was blossoming from Phil right at the end of his life.
FRIDAY: The beauty of a home-cooked meal together, and more improv, on what ended up being Phil's last night. Dylan taking full creative control, and doing things on his terms, off-script, as Jane became a background character. Allowing everything that was actually present. The normalcy of death, alongside the magnitude. Death as its own kind of ecstasy [3min clip].
SATURDAY: Dosing morphine. Saying goodbye. A single day (!) of active dying. Peacefulness in breath and beyond. Poetry and music at the deathbed. The moment of death [5min clip]. Being slow and spacious – there’s no need to rush. How Phil's cats responded. Getting time with your loved one after death makes a world of difference [5min clip]. Contrasting the experience with the death of Dylan’s mom a decade earlier, when he was 17. Watch Jane eat a banana. Softness and emotional honesty as strength. Contacting the hospice. Taking all the time Dylan needed with his dad’s body.
SUNDAY: Talking to Phil all the while. Dylan regaining full emotional expression through dance. Writing poetry and making his own meaning around the loss. What is beautiful is true. A newfound agency that comes with both parents being dead. The anointing ritual and shamanic anger [10min clip]. Letting rip what had always stayed unspoken. Going a bit mad with grief. Cleaning Phil’s body together as an act of care, respect, and restoration of dignity. How soothing the normalcy and intimacy of this whole death experience was. The grounded urgency that death evokes in us [4min clip].
MONDAY: Importance of the haptic element in Dylan's grief process. The hearse arriving and the visceral effect of Phil’s body being taken away. Choosing a crematorium; the robotic ‘professionalism’ of the death industry. Get rid of your shit before you die! Feeling ancestral support and pride during the cremation. Dylan having completed everything he needed and wanted to do for his family. What’s been coming through in his dream world. Dylan's testimonial for the kind of death doula Jane is [2.5min clip]. It's easier to understand what a doula does once you have one – the many hats worn. A beautiful, mysterious, creative, ecstatic experience. Dylan relentlessly showing up and getting the job done.
I also put together some questions for you to ponder, based on our conversation and our experience at Phil’s deathbed:
What if you and your dying loved one could write the script: for what happens at their deathbed, and afterward? What if you had creative control in meeting the death and grief experience?
Can you allow yourself to have fun, and laugh, at moments around death? How many colors of experience can be included and embraced? Would you feel like a bad person if you had fun engaging with death?
What would emerge if you were held, resourced, and given tons of zero-judgment emotional space, as you navigated losing and grieving your loved one?
What aspects of conscious experience, of life, have been lost to you because your relationship with death is not allowing and including them? How is death a doorway to the fullness of experience?
Can we be present to the entire unfolding of a death, rather than focusing on one aspect or what is on the other side?
What if we worshipped each other while we were alive, like in an after-death anointing ritual? And what if we took the time to say everything we needed to say to each other, leaving nothing unspoken?
Thank you for reading. If you check out the podcast, I’d absolutely love to hear how it lands for you. Being bedside for Phil’s death was one of the great honors and peak experiences of my life thus far. If in the future I can assist with the death of your loved one, please contact me. I especially love working with people already in my network, like Dylan – friends, family, friends of friends, acquaintances. And I may be able to travel to you! As I did for Phil and Dylan.
And with that, I’ll leave you with a poem that Dylan wrote a few days after Phil’s death:
“Your Last Day”
I didn’t see it in your face until your last day,
Your face relaxed,
Your lips parted —
A child’s face.
How could you be so young and also so old?
You were so peaceful on your last day,
and,
damn you,
you slipped through quicker than any of us thought.
And yet —
All my life I saw
The struggle clutching at your muscles,
but here,
at the end of the world
you were a newborn baby,
silvery hair splayed across
the pillow
and a white rose
held between your hands.
Thank you for letting me be with you
and for showing me the door
To perfect stillness
Perfect peace
And perfect silence.
Now Go!
Rise like the mist
And spread the soft fingers of
Your heart
Across the promise in my own
Spread out your breath like dewdrops
Twinkling on the inky black canvas
of space.
Find my Mother —
Whatever and wherever she is —
Rest,
And watch me take it from here.
If you live in the US, please know that home funerals are legal in all 50 states! Check out the National Home Funeral Alliance to learn more. Dylan and I also used this amazing body-care and home-funeral guide from the NHFA to care for Phil’s body after death.
